I talk funny, well different, that is I communicate with an electronic device called a Servox, as I lost my vocal chords to throat cancer back in 2000. I’ve gone 3 rounds with throat cancer, first time I was scared to death, second time I lost my vocal chords and hence my natural voice and the third time it nearly killed me. After I lost my voice I took early retirement. I was a salesman, I decided  that the market for salesman that couldn’t talk was small to say the least and would only get smaller... So what else could I do? I started gardening!!!!......And boy my life ain’t been the same since, I thought losing my ability to talk was a life changer, hey gardening is even more so but in a good way.

When you’ve had cancer you’re always worried it’s coming back or has it already come back and I don’t know it, all natural responses to having had the disease. Will I still be alive this time next year? I had thoughts like that a good bit of the time, tried not to let on to my loved ones but hey I was scared. And then it happened, not all at once but slowly slowly. I kinda got involved with gardening through the back door so to speak. I had a friend who fed birds on their back patio and raccoons came there too and one evening the birds and the raccoons really put on a show and I was hooked, hooked line and sinker. I was going to feed me some wild birds and have wildlife come to my yard to visit me (as I interpreted it) Why I’d have company all the time, birds, squirrels, coons, hey who or whatever wanted some food and water....And I’d watch them every day and evening as I sat out there while reading or listening to the radio. And then I started reading books about feeding birds and read about this other foreign thing I’d never heard of before, ‘gardening for birds’.....Gardening for birds?.....What the heck is that?.....Well 3 or 4 hundred or so perennials, annuals, shrubs, roses, vines later, I know what gardening for birds is all about.

Oh back to that other thing, cancer and my doctor....Well I’m tooling along again in life going to every nursery I can find without a GPS in the car, bought every plant that would even remotely provide food for birds and critters, bought so many kinds of bird feeders my wife threatened to leave me if I bought another one, and bird seed, good lord I went through 200 lbs. a month in bird seed like it wasn’t nothing. And not regular black oilers like I feed them now but hulled sunflower seeds, the kind they don’t even have to crack to eat, the filet mignon of bird seed.....and then low and behold on one of the checkups come to find out I’d had a reoccurrence of cancer, in my case about as close a thing to a death sentence as you’d get with the kind of cancer I had and the stage etc

Well I might be getting ahead of myself here, you see I’d been immersed in the world of plants by now for several years and all I looked forward to was seeing them little perennials poke their little heads outta the ground about February, March or so.....I got to thinking about them plants coming back instead of me dying this week or next month or next year, I just about forgot about me and mostly thought about the plants, the flowers, the fragrance of the flowers, the bird’s songs, the flittering movement of birds among the flower beds of our yard......Heck I’d about plumb forgot about cancer....I wasn’t going to die, heck I needed to be here to mulch them coneflowers next year, I mean who’s going to weed?....Hey I’m going to be here, I got a reason to be here.....One that’s not so much about me but about something else.....No doubt about it boys and girls, gardening gives you a reason to look forward to next year and the next and the next without just the fact that “hey I wanna be here and don’t wanna die, which is a reasonable expectation I guess but not completely satisfying in certain respects......

Oh back to that other thing, cancer and my doctor......So I’m sitting in his office and he comes in with his surgical nurse and she grabs my hand tenderly and squeezed it like I might die while I’m sitting there in the chair, right away I know the news ain’t good and it ain’t....most folks in my situation now have a year maybe, proably less but before he has time to tell me anything substantively about what’s going on with me I just ask him one question, “Hey doc, give it to me straight, should I plant annuals this year or perennials?” Well I kinda had a goofy grin on my face that I have when I said it and I looked at him and he looked at me and the surgical nurse looked at me and they both looked at each other and then we all burst out laughing at the same time......That was  8 years ago, I’ve been growing perennials all these years and I’m still here, you see I gotta be.....I mean who’s gonna mulch the coneflowers....Who’s going to weed? And everytime I go for my yearly checkup I ask the Doc the same old question after he checks me out, “Do I plant perennials or annuals this year Doc?” and then we all burst out laughing.......

One caveat, some folks aren’t as lucky as I’ve been so far, they’re situation is grave and the humor I implied in my own situation in no way should belittle the fight these folks have on their hands even as we speak. I wish them all well.

Paul from Alabama